Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.

The Mozilla Foundation and graphic rendering technology company Otoy have built a video codec, written with JavaScript and WebGL, that would eliminate the need for using plug-ins to view video in a browser.

The ORBX.js codec can also be used to render remote applications in a browser, and comes with a watermarking technology that would eliminate the need to add DRM (digital rights management) to content.

ORBX.js will allow video to be handled entirely by the browser, said Otoy founder and CEO Jules Urbach. Producers of video content would no longer have to worry about formatting video for a specific codec, such as H.264 or Google's VP8, neither of which are supported by all browsers.

Mozilla has experimented in trying to implement H.264 entirely in JavaScript. The development team for that JavaScript library, Broadway.js, found H.264 difficult to implement efficiently. ORBX.js, on the other hand, can offer 25 percent better compression than H.264, according to Mozilla.

Considering the current (un)support of WebGL, which is basically an OpenGL 1.2 derivative, on OpenGL 4.3 capable machines, it's just flabbergasting. Even Opera who made a big buzz abou their early support of WebGL only introduced it in their stable release in version 12, and it's still far from complete (support only very basic WebGL web sites, 90% don't work at all)

Then comes the native H264/WebM support, etc... MNG was supposed to replace animated GIF, how much MNG-compliant browsers out there ?

SVG is a mess, support is scarce as well, Opera mostly hangs on that (yeah, I use Opera but I'm thinking more and more to switch) etc...